XXXI
It was about this time that Belinda came to a momentous resolution. She said to herself: "I've made Morry feel that he wants me. Now I've got to show him how much he wants me. I'll just clear out and let him see what it feels like to miss me."
The process of "clearing out" was accomplished by the acceptance of an invitation to cruise for a week with an aunt of May Van Raalt. There was to be a gay party of young people aboard. It was the most natural thing in the world for Belinda to wish to go.
When, however, she told Morris, during their afternoon ride, that Sophy had consented to this outing, he seemed to regard it as not only a highly absurd idea but as a personal affront. In fact he was so outrageously ill-tempered about it that Belinda was in inner ecstasies at the sureness of her "inspiration." "If he's like this before I even start, what will he be like by the time I come back?" she thought gleefully.
She set off on the day appointed, in high spirits, all the higher because Morris had refused to shake hands at parting and called her a "shallow gad-about."
But he was shortly to rest in amazement before the fact of how excessively he cared. Everything seemed strangely flat without her. He missed her provocative teasing ... the singing of his blood at her look and touch. The constant, thrilling struggle with temptation. One certainly "lived" every atom of the time that one spent near Linda. She kept existence at high-pressure. One could almost see the little "nigger squat on the safety-valve" of her pleasure-craft, by George! But then, too, she was such bully fun to ride with and romp with. Nothing highbrow about Linda. All the same he wasn't going to let her make a fool of him. But, by George! she was the sort one missed—confound her!——
The day after Belinda's departure he was again in the full swing of his old tippling habit. To do without the stimulants both of drink and Belinda he found beyond him. But even this remedy proved vain. The flatness left by her absence was not to be dispelled so easily. The thought of her dogged him night and day.
With Sophy his intercourse was very restricted. On the occasions that the conventional exigencies of their life brought them together he treated her with an aloof and ceremonious politeness. But this manner was not now so much the result of displeasure as of a growing indifference.
The thought of Belinda was such an obsessing flame that all other facts of his existence had become like shadows, Sophy among them. He craved the girl's return so fiercely that he had no coolness of imagination left with which to regard anything but that desired and immediate future. What was to be the result of their reckless, hot-blooded drawing each to each did not seem to him to matter much just then. All that mattered was that this hateful, gnawing emptiness should be filled. He was not used to that hungry cramp of "wanting." Even his want for Sophy—which had for a time given him the wholesome discipline of the seemingly unattainable—had been only too soon assuaged. In some way, somehow ... he was lordly in his vagueness ... this horrid vacuum created by Belinda must be filled by her.